Yet if po-mo is an architectural style its filtered through the policies and trends that lead to its implementation. For postmodern architecture can be seen as, on the one hand, monied grand gesture, and on the other, architectural inventiveness, revelling in the possibilities of new materials and designs; we are postmodernists because we can be.
In the other arts the postmodern is not so directly oppositional. Literary postmodernism seems to me to have two epochs, two approaches: the absurdist 60s/70s works of Pynchon, Gaddis and Barth on the one hand, and then again the more ironic work that followed in the 80s/90s - of which Mark Leyner's "My Cousin, the Gastroenterologist" (1990) is a high point. Ironic style is key to much of this later postmodernism, and the journalism of the Modern Review or, later, the writers gathered around McSweeney's are evidence enough of its mainstreaming.
I like to think of the postmodern as being two things: in some ways an inversion or conversion of the conventional - Oldenburg's giant pop art sculptures of penknives or Jeff Koons' "Puppy" made of flowers, or Craig Raine's "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home" - but also/equally a certain brashness that prefers the signifier to what is signified, the facade of the thing becoming more "real" than the thing itself. In this sense the remix, particularly cut ups or repurposings like Shut Up and Dance's "Raving, I'm Raving" or the 12" Gotham City Mix of the Communards "Don't Leave Me This Way" are only possible in a world where the postmodern is celebrated, not just accepted. But grand gestures are also there in Fiona Banner's appropriative work like "The Hunt for Red October" which takes the whole of a schlocky action movie and - from memory writes it on a gallery wall. Our current age of meta- is po-mo with a beard and a fixee - but then again, "the hipster" is a creation of postmodernism, we just never expected him to become taken seriously. (On screen, Nathan Barley, like Max Headroom and TV party before it are Postmodern; in a way that the revamp of Battlestar Galactica or Downton Abbey or Breaking Bad aren't.)
And po-mo has its fair share of bad art, bad TV, even good art masquerading as bad art. Despite or because of our grey skies, po-mo has a long Manchester history, and it seems that more recently, shows in our public galleries, appropriating The Smiths, Marx or other iconic bits of Manchester history are po-mo through and through. The Cornerhouse/Home programme over the last year or so, has all been about a po-mo appropriation; though there's a point it seems to me, where one of the obvious traits of the postmodern (its size, its garishness) is being itself subverted in a kind of po-mo minimalism, if that's even possible, which might be missing the point: or simply, in an age where we are all looking at tiny screens all the time, an inevitable miniaturising of (even) public experience.
I do think that po-mo, if it really is more about the signifier than the signified should be a grand gesture - otherwise we're merely talking about influence, not subversion. Manchester, though not as obviously in thrall to po-mo as London, LA, Tokyo or Vegas has (or has had) its signature moments. At a point in the remaking of the city centre where it seems every non-memorably sixties/seventies building is being pulled down to be replaced with an (equally non-memorable) allegedly more functional replacement, po-mo, which never quite put down roots, needs recognsiing.
That we have some po-mo architecture at all seems to be a mix of civic laissez faire, a latent situationism, and early-career statementism by developers and architects. Most, if not all of the city's po-mo architecture and interiors are pre-2008.
Best/worst of all is on the city's peripherary: the neoclassical megalithic shopping centre that is the Trafford Centre is a perfectly over-the-top example of what happenns when bad taste, too much money, and the dullest of concepts (an out of town shopping centre) combine. Faced with a large box surrounded by a car park, the Trafford Centre has been given a ridiculous external grandeur that is almost Vegas-like. Here, po-mo has a genuine architectural/civic purpose, to disguise the fact that this is a massive indoor shopping centre surrounded by acres of car parks, by making its facade appear to be like some kind of Disney castle. In a thousand years, archeologists may have no clearer idea of what this was for, than we have about the pyramids.
Such brash functionality (and think of the alternative: Arndale style brutalism), is rare in the city's po-mo. With the glorious Imperial War Museum North, the building is a materialised shell, echoing the dark nature of its content - a carapace that echoes the ominous Futurism of the tanks and weaponry inside. Its like the world's most sympathetically clothed bunker, or a building that apes the statementism of Epstein's "Rock Drill." The other jewel in our po-mo crown is surely Ian Simpson's glorious glass wedge, URBIS, now home to the National Football Museum. Built at a bit of a civic statement after the city centre's redesign following the 1996 bomb, it feels like a two-finger up to that domestic terrorism: rather than build new buildings that can be as solid against a blast as the venerable Corn Exchange which it faces, we'll build something that's ALL glass. Simpson's Manchester has never been quite so post-modern again, with bigger projects being more functional, paid for by investment money, which doesn't really give much time to adding to costs through adding a postmodern facade on, say, an office block. Of recent builds, only the Tracey Island style terraces of the new Co-op building, Noma, have any po-mo credentials. Elsewhere in the city, there's Urban Splash's absurdist Chips building, which now looks like a pre-crash last hurrah.
We can have regrets of course - that the "Berlin Wall" in Piccadilly Gardens somehow grew a po-mo skins over its minimal concrete blankness - or that Thomas Hetherington's stunning "B of the Bang" hadn't been built in the wrong place, with the wrong materials, necessitating it coming down. The strangely anomalous sign on the "Light" building in the Northern Quarter, or - just possibly - the big sign that lets you know you are at the not-in-the-least-bit postmodern "Home" feel like postmodern subtitles imposed on the city's generally pragmatic architectural mix. Interiors may be a better option - hardy perennial cult bar FAB cafe, the nicely flamboyant interior of Mr. Cooper's House, the restaurant in the Midland hotel, and of course, forgotten memories of the Hacienda that keep popping up every time there's some re-remembering of that increasingly mythical place.
I suspect the crash and subsequent austerity quelled desire for postmodernism in British architecture - and we'll probably only see its echoes and ghostly reminders in short term pop ups and digital projections. Yet for a style that began, there or thereabouts, forty years or more ago, its proved surprisingly resilient, I guess, the nature of po-mo's pick and mix theoretical underpinning meaning that its always there if you want it to be. Manchester has flirted with it, as it has with other styles, but I suspect the new aesthetic won't have much time for such ironical questioning.
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